GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Mendocino County: Where You Could Find the Most Expensive Gallon of Gas in US History at $9.45 Per Gallon.

Earlier: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden:  As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”

Don’t think of it as yet another crisis by design; it’s all part of Biden’s “incredible transition:” Biden praises high gas prices as part of ‘incredible transition’ of the US economy away from fossil fuels.

Speaking of which: ‘Thanks, Joe:’ Gas Prices Have Officially Doubled Since Biden Became President.

MEDIA MYTH ALERT: 50 years after ‘Napalm Girl,’ myths distort the reality behind a horrific photo of the Vietnam War and exaggerate its impact.

WELL YES, BUT TO ACKNOWLEDGE THIS WOULD BE DOUBLEPLUS UNGOOD CRIMETHINK:

DON’T OVERLOOK WHAT MATT WALSH HAS DONE HERE:  “These African men laugh – they literally laugh – at the notion a woman might have a penis. They laugh because it is a laughable premise (again, to everyone outside the West and its fabricated gender enlightenment). So how can the American Left respond to this? Obviously what these men are saying and doing makes a mockery of the left’s gender ideology. If said by a white American male, it would be considered the height of bigotry. But these aren’t white American men. These are black men (and women) of a different culture. Progressives may worship the idol of gender, but they also worship the idol of diversity and multiculturalism. By their own rules, their dismissal of, or disagreement with the lived experiences of another people group – particularly black-skinned groups – is racist and Anglo-centric.”

BIDEN’S PRESCRIPTION: New York restricts sales of semiautomatic weapons to 21 and over. “Like most of what Biden said last night, this idea seems doomed. It might give lawmakers a couple of years of bragging rights about ‘doing something’ before these laws get tossed out, however.”

MULTIPLE PEOPLE SHOT AT DA’SHONTAY KING FUNERAL AT GRACELAND CEMETERY, WISCONSIN.

WAIT, WHEN WAS MILTON FRIEDMAN RUNNING THE SHOW? How the Government is Destroying Our Money (Explained).

(Classical allusion in headline.)

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: AOC-backed progressive candidate drops out of NY race, blames Democratic Party’s redistricting and accuses it of racism.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: CA Charter School Touts ‘Proud Queer Asian-Latinx Educator’ Teaching ‘Complexities of Intersectionality’ to 5-Year-Olds.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Karine Jean-Pierre Refuses To Tell Press — Or Can’t Tell Press — Who Briefed Joe Biden About Baby Formula Crisis. Biden: CEOs Understood the Abbott Shutdown Would Be Devastating– But I Didn’t.

FASTER, PLEASE: U.S. Intel: ‘Everyone Is Sensing the End Is Near’ for Putin.

AND THIS IS WHY WE SAY, “DON’T GET COCKY:” Gas Prices Are Skyrocketing, So House Republicans Are Running On Reducing Greenhouse Gases For Midterms.

In accordance with the prophecy: Democrat Pilot And Republican Co-Pilot Argue Over How Fast They Should Fly Plane Into Ground.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Gov. Ron DeSantis to Veto $35 Million Tampa Bay Rays Facility Amid Polarization of Shootings. “DeSantis is giving a voice to the people who do not want their sports and children’s companies on the front lines of the cultural divide. Florida residents had called for DeSantis to veto the spending anyway, saying that Floridians’ tax dollars should not help fund a facility for a professional sports team.”

UPDATE: The Governing Style of Ron DeSantis: Create the Public Polling Results, Don’t Follow Them.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: New documentary shows pediatrician saying prepubescent kids are ready for trans hormone therapy ‘whenever they ask for it’ and claiming you can ‘pause’ hormones ‘like music’ with the same drugs used to chemically castrate pedophiles.

THE PAST IS NOT ONLY STRANGER THAN WE IMAGINE, BUT STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: Park Ave. Pickelhaube Pyramids — WW1’s Strangest Monuments. New video from historian Mark Felton:

SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: New York City lawmaker assumes ‘white supremacy’ motivated Tulsa shooter—he was black.

WHOOPS:

CREEPY PORN LAWYER UPDATE: Michael Avenatti sentenced to four years in prison for defrauding Stormy Daniels.

Flashback: A Look Back At All The Media Praise For Michael Avenatti.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? California passes bill to prevent schools from reporting students with behavioral issues to law enforcement.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Mountain lion roams into California high school classroom.

OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: Covid was liberalism’s endgame.

How are we to understand the dramatically different responses of our society to the Spanish flu of a century ago and to Covid today? There is an inverse relationship between the severity of these pandemics and the severity of measures to control them. Clearly, Covid acquired some of its emergency energy from the ambient political crisis dating from 2016, which put the establishment on a war footing. But it also slotted nicely into the more general politics of emergency that is the unacknowledged core of technocratic progressivism, and is further advanced today than it was in 1918.

In 2020, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life, and a corresponding transfer of sovereignty from representative bodies to unelected agencies located in the executive branch of government. Notoriously, polling indicated that perception of the risks of Covid outstripped the reality by one to two orders of magnitude, but with a sharp demarcation: the hundredfold distortion was among self-identified liberal Democrats, that is, those whose yard signs exhorted us to “believe in science”.

In a technocratic regime, whoever controls what Science Says controls the state. What Science Says is then subject to political contest, and subject to capture by whoever funds it. Which turns out to be the state itself. Here is an epistemic self-licking ice cream cone that bristles at outside interference. Many factual ambiguities and rival hypotheses about the pandemic, typical of the scientific process, were resolved not by rational debate but by intimidation, with heavy use of the term “disinformation” and attendant enforcement by social media companies acting as franchisees of the state. In this there seems to have been a consistent bias toward scientific interpretations that induced fear, even at the cost of omitting relevant context.

If all of this strikes you as illiberal, it should. Yet in another sense, the central role of fear in politics has an impeccable liberal pedigree in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. This brings us to the deeper, anthropological project of liberalism.

Which speaks volumes, considering how deeply illiberal much of 1910s America were.

DON’T GET COCKY: The GOP midterm wave is set — and Democrats can’t do anything about it.

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Epileptic Child Has Seizure After Gazing At Latest Pride Flag.

—The Babylon Bee, May 24th.

The Brooklyn Nets today: Hold my beer!

Related: The History of TV Color Bars, One of the First Electronic Graphics Ever Made.

UPDATE: Another prophecy from the Bee came true today: Powerful: Military To Allow Troops To Replace Camo With Colors Of Their Gender Identity Flag.

—The Babylon Bee, March 13th, 2021.

The Marine Corps today:

RAND PAUL DEMANDS ANSWERS ABOUT FEDERAL EMPLOYEES GETTING PAYMENTS FROM DRUG COMPANIES THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO OVERSEE: “NIH is a revolving door of tens of billions of dollars in government grant-making coupled with hundreds of millions of dollars in private—non-transparent—royalty payments. There needs to be a lot more sunshine on this potentially unholy alliance.’ ‘When a federal bureaucrat pops up on television giving us health instructions, who has paid them and for what research and technology?’ [Adam Andrzejewski of OpenTheBooks] asks. ‘When a patient agrees to a clinical trial or experimental treatment, what financial interests are involved?’”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Biden’s Chief of Staff, and the Acting Shadow President, Ron Klain is Obsessed With High Gas Prices.

But He Has a Plan For Dealing With Them. “Klain didn’t care about gas prices before they started really hurting Democrats’ poll numbers. In fact, Democrats celebrated high fuel prices as a necessary part of their Incredible Transition. But now Klain’s worried about them. Not because it hurts American citizens, but because it hurts anti-American Democrats.”